Deafheaven was initially George Clark (vocals) and Kerry McCoy (guitar), and now includes Joey Bautista (guitar), Derek Prine (bass), and Korey Severson (drums). They are from San Francisco, and Roads to Judah is their debut album.
And oh, what an album it is, too. I guess technically their genre is metal, or hardcore, or something like that – I think I saw one description that referred to it as “metal sludge” – but all of those terms are either wholly inadequate or just wrong.
Roads to Judah is a lot of things, but mostly it is awesome, in the original sense of the word: both beautiful, and a little scary. It’s majestic. It’s orchestral, if the orchestra in question had listened to Metal Machine Music several times, meditated on it for a week, and then sat down to jam about their feelings.
Here is an example of what I mean. This is Violet, the first song on the record:
And in contrast, here is Tunnel of Trees, the last song:
And here is an excerpt from their SXSW 2012 set:
For more information visit the Deafheaven official website.
Band photo by June Zandona.